Contributions by Kate Baird:

Collaborators’ Q&A: Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Artist Kate Baird: Sure. You’re taking something made using one system of meaning and pulling it into another, emphasizing some parts and losing others. Hopefully you’re keeping some of what animated the original piece and also creating something that has meaning of its own. If this broadside were a type of weather, what would it be? Translator Rowena Hill: A brooding afternoon, fine but with a change not too far off.

Poet Igor Barreto was born in San Fernando de Apure, on the plains of Venezuela, in 1952. Poet, critic, publisher and leader of literature workshops. He has published ten books of poems. Translator Rowena Hill taught English Literature at the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida, Venezuela, where she has been based for more than forty years. She has published five books of poems in Spanish and has translated into English some of Venezuela’s best known poets. Kate Baird is a visual artist and the museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri.

Poet Jennifer K. Sweeney: I thought there might be some interpretation of impermanence, a kind of blurriness in the flux. Artist Kate Baird: I was interested in representing the passage of time through stacking, like sediment. Also the material properties of the rice paper roof…

Collaborators: Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections and recipient of the James Laughlin Award. She lives in California’s Inland Empire where she teaches privately and at the University of Redlands. Kate Baird is a visual artist and the museum educator at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. She is also a founder of Placeworks, a multi-disciplinary arts program for rural schools

Collaborators’ Q&A What inspires you in this poem? Artist Kate Baird: The idea of the line (or path or intention or life) that continues until it doesn’t is one that I like to mull over, and thresholds and doorways are images that I like to play around with, so this was definitely the poem for me. What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Poet Matthew Thorburn: This is a …

Note: This broadside is part of our annual translation special feature in which we feature two broadsides—one from a forthcoming publication from Tavern Books, one by a poet writing in a language indigenous to the Americas. Collaborators’ Q&A Do you see an overlap between the act of translation and the act of responding visually to a piece of literature? Artist Kate Baird: Yes—I think that, generally speaking, making images is a form of translation that …

Collaborators’ Q&A What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Poet Sean Prentiss: I wasn’t sure. Being a writer, I notice literal details. The names of the bars. The way people look. The cut of a bar. So I would have imaged a literal interpretation of the poem. Something that showed the poem visually. What I love about this idea of pairing a writer and an artist is the way the …

Collaborators’ Q&A, Season by Season Poem Subject: The earthquakes in Haiti and Chile; Art Subject: The death of J.D. Salinger Once you saw the art for your season, did it cause you to see your haiku in a different light? Poet Anastassia Cafatti Mac-Niven: No, it didn’t do any difference to my haiku. But now that I think about it, the art suits my haiku because it has something to do with death, and the haiku …

Collaborators’ Q&A What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Poet Jari Thymian: I didn’t know what to expect. It felt like my poem was acting as canvas—a new experience. I’m delighted the ravens appear on center stage. They had migrated from a poem that hadn’t worked earlier to this one. The image of the ravens on Odin’s shoulders had been with me for several years. Did Kate read my mind? What …

Collaborators’ Q&A This image was created outside of the usual Broadsided “respond to writing” system—can you talk about its origins? Artist Kate Baird: I used to drive back and forth between Missouri and the East Coast a lot and always noticed the tall spindly highway signs. They seemed like the signs/markers that they are, but also like strange plants cropping up here and there, fragile and hearty and a little sad. This poem was chosen in …

Collaborators’ Q&A Did the visual artist refract any element of the poem that made you see the poem differently? What surprised you about this collaborative piece? Poet Aaron Plasek: The blue hand, the branching tree, the wallet complete with card I can’t quite make out: these seem like useful objects, but the image of the fingerprint (or finger tip?) is genius. A fingerprint is the proof we leave behind of our presence, it’s what we leave …

Artist Kate Baird: The smoke imagery attracted me to the poem—I thought it would be fun to try to draw smoke, which is a substance that is there and not there at the same time… Poet Noel Sloboda: I also really like how the ascending smoke runs against the text, slowing down the read and teasing out different moods from the poem.

Collaborators: Noel Sloboda teaches at Penn State York and serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival. Kate Baird lives in New York City where she paints and reads as much as possible.

Poet Amanda Rachelle Warren: Something in the angles of Kate’s painting, “Bird’s Eye,” looks broken, fractured… or perhaps fractal, kaleidoscopic! Artist Kate Baird: I had been thinking of a “bird’s eye view” as a figure of speech referring to a particular perspective, but I never gave much thought to actual birds.

Collaborators: Amanda Rachelle Warren is a displaced Appalachian currently working as both a Part-Time Instructor and the Assistant to the Dean of the Graduate College at Western Michigan University. Kate Baird is a painter and works as a teaching artist in Springfield, MO.

Poet Richard Hoffman‘s work, both prose and verse, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Witness and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies. He is the author of the poetry collection Without Paradise (Cedar Hill Books.) Currently Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College, he also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, most recently a …

Poet Paul McCormick worked for many years as a clammer on the Great South Bay. He now writes literary passages for standardized tests. His recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Verse, Fence, Barrow Street, Conduit, Conjunctions and other journals. He lives in Huntington, NY. Artist Kate Baird, a native of Springfield, MO, now lives in New York City where she paints and reads as much as possible. Image: Ink …

Poet G.C. Waldrep books of poems are Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003) and Disclamor (forthcoming from BOA Editions, 2007). “Epithalamion” originally appeared in the Black Warrior Review. Artist Kate Baird, a native of Springfield, MO, now lives in New York City where she paints and reads as much as possible. Image: Ink and graphite on paper, 4″ x 6″